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Links ‘n’ thinks

I’ve been working on Graffiti Angel rewrites and plantsing along on my YA Space Opera this (last) week. Plus the odd bit on my May Queen sequel. Hey, at least it has a draft synopsis now. That’s something. Octocon is coming up this weekend so my delightful pre-con stress dreams have started – you know the type: locked in a loo, went out for a coffee and can’t get back etc. This means of course that I’m even more unfocused than usual! Really looking forward to the convention though.

So this post is a mixture of things that have caught my fancy on the internet over the last while:

Spacy stuff for himself

1)Sergey Korolov was the chief rocket scientist for the Soviet Union during the 1960s space race with the US. His identity was so secret he was referred to only as The Chief Designer. It is probably due to his early death in 1966 that the US were the first to land on the moon. His Soyuz spacecraft is still in use today, and has now taken on a new significance (video from BBC – sorry about the ad). I guess, as my space-mad husband pointed out, you could say he won in the end.

Books I love, writers I admire

2) Alan Garner’s books have been really important to me for as long as I can remember. Here he is talking about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (video from The Guardian) and the influence of Alderley Edge on his books. He describes perfectly the way I feel about Dalkey and Killiney, and how landscape works its way into writing. To (probably mis-) quote: “Here I learned the rockness of rock, the treeness of tree and the skyness of sky” – “…a sense of otherness about the place that goes back as far as there have been people to react to it”.